Recorded music has conventionally existed in human-readable and machine-readable forms. Human-readable music typically comprises a text, known as sheet music, containing written symbols that represent the sounds in a musical composition. Machine-readable music can be represented in many different formats based on the machine that is to play the music. For example, the Musical Instrument Digital Interface ("MIDI") standard specifies that aspects of music, such as pitch and volume, are encoded in 8-bit bytes of digital information.
Musicians have developed various musical notation systems for human-readable sheet music over the course of many centuries. The standard staff notation, based upon a staff (or stave) of five lines, represents the predominate musical notation system in Western music. Each line, and each space between the lines, comprises a different pitch. Notes representing a tone of a given pitch may be placed on a line or in a space. A clef, positioned at the beginning of every staff, indicates the pitch assigned to one of the lines, e.g., a treble clef and a base clef.
A musical notation system needs to suit the music it represents. Accordingly, musicians have developed other human-readable notational systems for particular types of music and particular instruments. The tablature staff, or "tab," comprises a human-readable notational system for representing music played on stringed instruments, such as a guitar or a bass. Rather than utilizing the symbols found in the conventional staff notation, tablature uses ordinary text characters and numbers to represent a musical score. Tablature tells the musician what notes to play by indicating which string should be struck and the effective length of the string. The effective length of the string is typically changed by placing a finger on the string so that vibration of the struck string stops at the placement of the finger. Some stringed instruments have frets to assist in the changing of the effective length of the string. A fret represents one of series of ridges fixed across a stringed instrument's fingerboard, such as the 24 frets commonly affixed on the neck of a guitar. In the following, the term "fretting" refers to the changing of the effective length of a string, whether the instrument has actual frets (e.g., a guitar) or not (e.g. a bass). Tablature may also tell the musician where hammer-ons, pull-offs, bends, slides, harmonics, and vibrato occur in a musical score. Tablature may even indicate an appropriate tuning for a musical score.
Tablature provides a music notation system that is rather simple for a musician to read because tablature corresponds to the six strings stretched across a guitar's long fretted neck. As shown in FIG. 1A, a musician conventionally tunes strings 120-125 of a guitar 100 as E, A, D, G, B, and E. The musician conventionally tunes the strings 120-125 upward from E, one line below the base clef of the conventional staff notation, to another E, the first line of the treble clef in the conventional staff notation. A musician plays a guitar by plucking the strings 120-125 with the fingers of the right hand while those of the left hand close various frets 101-109 to produce different tones and chords.
Tablature, such as that shown in FIG. 1B, utilizes lines 150-155 corresponding to the strings of a stringed instrument, e.g., the strings 120-125 of the guitar 100. The line 150 represents the highest pitch string (conventionally tuned to E), and the line 155 represents the lowest pitch string (conventionally tuned to a lower E). As shown in FIG. 1B, the tuning (E, A, D, G, B, E) for the lines 150-155 conventionally appears on the left side of the tablature notation.
Musical notes 160-165 written as numbers on the lines 150-155 tell the musician where to fret a string with the left hand. In tablature, a zero, such as a zero 160, indicates that a string should be played "open" and not fretted. As in the conventional staff notation, the musician reads a tablature notation from left to right to reveal an order in which the notes 160-165 should be played. The illustrated tablature notation of FIG. 1B indicates the sequence of the notes 160-165 to be played on the A string by moving up one fret at a time, e.g., playing first the open A string 124 of the guitar 100, then playing the A string 124 at the fret 101, followed by playing the A string 124 at the fret 102, and concluding by playing the A string 124 at the fret 105.
FIG. 1B illustrates a tablature notation in which the musician plays the notes 160-165 one at a time. Of course, a musician may play multiple notes together on a stringed instrument, and FIG. 2 illustrates a tablature notation that tells the musician when to play notes together in a musical score. Tablature notation indicates when the musician should play two or more notes together by writing one note on top of another, e.g., a note 202 over a note 201. The tablature notation shown in FIG. 2 represents a G-bar chord 207 by indicating that the musician should play the third fret of the E string 155 (the note 201) together with the fifth fret of the A string 154 (the note 202), the fifth fret of the D string 153 (a note 203), the fourth fret of the G string 152 (a note 204), the third fret of the B string 151 (a note 205), and the third fret of the E string 150 (a note 206). Thus, this tablature notation directs the musician to play the notes 201-206 together as the G-bar chord 207.
FIG. 3 shows the G-bar chord 207 of FIG. 2 written in a slightly different manner. The tablature notation showed in FIG. 3 indicates that the musician should strum the G-bar chord 207 starting at the E string 155 so that each string is hit slightly later than its preceding string, although all the notes 201-206 will ring together. Writing the notes 201-206 shown in FIG. 3 closer together signals the musician that the strings 150-155 should be strummed quickly while writing the notes 201-206 farther apart signals the musician to strum the strings 150-155 more slowly.
Tablature provides the musician with an indication of a musical score's rhythm, i.e., tablature tells the musician which notes are long and which are short. Nevertheless, tablature does not provide a musician with as precise an indication of a musical note's length as the notes provided by the conventional staff notation. Tablature also does not tell the musician which fingers should be used to fret which notes. In addition, tablature also does not normally provide information regarding picking and strumming, leaving these choices to the musician.
As illustrated by FIG. 4, tablature notation provides a musician with information regarding the relative lengths of the notes in a musical score only. Accordingly, a musician must often listen to a song to pick up its rhythm. Nevertheless, tablature provides the musician with some indications of timing. As a general rule, the spacing of notes in tablature tells the musician which notes are the long ones and which notes are the fast ones. For example, when a musician compares notes 401 and 402 shown in FIG. 4 with notes 403 and 404, the musician can determine a relative length for these notes, e.g., the note 401 is longer than the note 403.
Tablature notation also includes extra letters or symbols written between notes that indicate how the musician should play the notes. Table 1 provides some of the more commonly encountered symbols.
TABLE 1 Symbol Meaning H Hammer-On P Pull-Off B Bend String Up R Release Bend / Slide Up .backslash. Slide Down V Vibrato T Write Hand Tap X Play note with heavy damping
No single tablature convention exists, with many tablature variations diverging considerably. Tablature nevertheless provides a rich system for indicating musical notations to musicians playing stringed instruments. Of course, tablature notation may represent additional complexities in a musical score than have been discussed herein, and an interested reader is directed towards one of the many fine tablature reference works that have been composed since tablature's beginnings in the 13th century.
Musicians are increasingly using computer-based editing tools to compose and edit musical scores. For example, some systems may even teach methods for preparing a tablature notation for a musical score from a corresponding conventional staff notation. Unfortunately, the current computer-based systems for editing musical works expressed in tablature have not achieved the sophistication found in music editing systems for musical works expressed in the conventional staff notation. Accordingly, many tablature notations published alongside a corresponding conventional staff notation for the same musical score often do not coincide, causing great frustration for musicians attempting to master the underlying musical work. Present tablature notations also tend to be unduly rigid, forcing musicians to conform to the tablature notation expressed, rather than providing a tablature notation containing comfortable fret locations for the musician. Thus, musicians would benefit from improved tablature editing and preparation tools in computer-based music editing and composing systems.